6 Progressive Evolution or Completed Creation?

The entire cosmos with all its countless stars, all basic types of life, as well as man, were created directly by God in one week, as described in Genesis.

Evolution: The entire cosmos, our earth, and all life-forms resulted
from an extremely slow process of development from the simple
to the complex, from barely structured to higher forms of organization,
from inanimate to animate, and from low life-forms to
higher levels. All organisms can be arranged in a line of descent and
development right up to man. According to the evolutionary view,
this process is still continuing. All earlier living organisms were merely
temporary forms of life at that moment, and present-day individuals
should then be regarded as halfway stations for future developments
(see evolutionary assumption E11). In this respect, Wuketits believes
that evolution as such has not stopped [W7, p. 275]. “It seems justified
to expect new kinds and new degrees of differentiation to appear.”
The following quotations confirm the assumption of continuing
evolution in various areas:

Continuing cosmic evolution: “Not only life, but also the entire
cosmos went through a process of development. Beginning
with a singularity of immense density and temperature and
with the ‘big bang.’ The universe assumed its present form
after a development lasting approximately 15 thousand million
years” (R. Siewing [S6, p. XIX]). In the evolutionary view,
this process has definitely not been completed. An extremely
distant stage of development is described by R. Breuer [B8,
p. 51]: “The sun, together with the earth, may eventually be
ejected from our galaxy. Then, in the dark isolation of intergalactic
space, the earth will have all the time in the world to
fall in slow motion into the black hole that had once been
the sun. At this time, after 1020
years, the classical evolution
of the cosmos would end.” S. Weinberg justifiably referred to
the “dark cloud of great uncertainty” that looms over such a
cosmological model.

Continuing biological evolution: “Man and beast can no longer
be seen as . . . completed creatures of a paradisiacal six-day
activity. But the kinds originated during long epochs of earth’s
history, one after the other, fulfilling themselves and changing,
dying out or branching off in new directions from an upward-flowing current aspiring to the organic perfection of living
matter. Eventually the present diversity of forms developed”
(J. Illies [I2, p. 33]).

Continuing human evolution: “At the moment we are the apex
reached by the great constructors of changing kinds on earth,
we are ‘state of the art,’ but certainly not their last word. . . . If I had to regard man as the final image of God, then this
view of God would drive me insane. But when I realize that
our recent ancestors (in terms of the history of the earth) were
very ordinary monkeys, closely related to chimpanzees, then I
catch a glimmer of hope. It does not require undue optimism
to assume that something better and higher may yet develop
from us humans. . . . The long sought for missing link between
animals and real human beings—are we!” (K. Lorenz [L2, p.
215–216]).

The Bible: The entire cosmos with all its countless stars, all basic
types of life, as well as man, were created directly by God in one
week, as described in Genesis. The whole of creation was finished
and complete. All biological changes that occurred since that time
only resulted in diversification within the original kinds (e.g., the
origin of races).

We read in Genesis 2:2 that “By the seventh day God had finished
the work He had been doing; so on the seventh day He rested from
all His work.” And in Hebrews 4:3: “And yet His work has been
finished since the creation of the world.”

Did God Use Evolution?

According to the view of theistic evolution, God started the process of evolution and guided and steered it over millions of years. As an information scientist, Werner Gitt critically analyzes and rejects the assumptions and consequences of the doctrine of theistic evolution.